Fighting

I do a lot of fighting. Fighting for my kids. For their medical needs to be met and exceeded. Fighting for my family, my husband…fighting for all the people in my life who can’t always fight for themselves in the moment.

I’ve been a fighter my entire life. Every day of my existence is a battle from start to finish. Between the surgeries and my massively abusive childhood and all the trauma and the bullshit…day in and day out….I’ve had to fight. Just to survive, I had to fight. I’ve had to do things that made no sense. I’ve had to do things that I never would have ever considered necessary…just in order to survive.

It’s laughable, the amount of fight I’ve had to produce. Just to continue to exist. Just so my kids have the same basic life experiences as everyone else.

But when it comes to myself…? Yeah…I still fight.
But that fight looks pretty different.

I don’t think I’m fighting for myself. Sure, I am a little bit, and I always will. I’ll continue to show up and work on myself and strive to do better….

But I think mostly, I’m fighting against myself now. And I really don’t know why that is. Maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m exhausted from fighting everyone else’s fights for them, maybe I’ve had a lifetime of battle, and the war feels no closer to ending than it ever has….maybe a million different things.

But the answer is still the same. As much as I really am trying to fight for myself…I think I’m fighting against me just as hard.

Somewhere along the way, and I don’t even know when, I think I just gave up. I gave up on myself, on the possibility of hope, of healing…I gave up. And fighting a hopeless battle just seemed like…a lost cause. A wasted effort.

Why fight a losing battle, especially when my efforts are needed in so many other places? I just lost the energy to fight for myself. Because it has felt like such a lost cause for so long.

I’m at a place now where I honestly don’t even know what fighting for myself even looks like.
Is it enough to just continue to show up? Is it enough to just start talking? Seriously, what does it even look like at this point?

I want to fight for myself…in a more real and genuine way. But first, I think I need to figure out what that even means…what it looks like. Except I don’t even know how to go about figuring that out.

I know what it means to fight for my kids, for my family…for everyone else in the world….besides me.

Because I think if we’re really being honest here, all I know how to do for myself is fight against it all. Push any and everything away, and run.

I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years, running head first into every obstacle along the way.
And even when I really, truly think I’m fighting the good fight, really trying, and doing the right thing by me….I’m often proved wrong.

I’ve been fighting myself for longer than I think I’ve realized. Maybe even my whole life. And maybe I don’t even know how to fight for myself, instead of against…but maybe I can try.

This kid…this little 5 week old baby that’s currently zapping me of every single energy store I thought I had… deserves the best version of me. And so do my other boys. Shit, I deserve the best version of me. It’s something I’ve been looking for for a very long time.

I don’t know where to look, and I don’t even know what I’m looking for….but something needs to change.

I need to stop fighting myself…
And start fighting for myself.

If only I knew what that meant…….